Author Archives: BGHenderson

Getting Started with Social Media for Your Business

When you are getting started with social media, trying to get all of these different tools set up for your online business, it can be a little overwhelming. There are numerous online tools available, with new ones coming out every week.

What I want to focus on are the major tools, the ones that dominate the their markets and are considered authority sites. By adding quality content within these platforms, you will slowly build up a following and this will also lead to stronger and higher rankings in the search engines.

It is best to set up one of the social media sites from start to finish and then move onto the next one. You want to make sure that you have set everything up correctly and by focusing on a single site, you do not get confused with what you may be working on for another social media site.

On of the most important reasons for setting these sites up one at a time is for traffic flow. When you know that you have one site set up properly, then you will not have to go back and fix problems that interfere with the next social media site you are setting up.

Since I have covered writing content for your sites in other posts, I will only say that it is very important that you make sure that whatever you write is very clear, compelling and will solve your visitors problem, or answer there question. Good quality content can help your website and social media pages move higher in the search engines as well as build a strong loyal following for your product or service.

Starting your Online Business with a Blog

If you do not have a website or a blog, you will want a home base. Somewhere to send your social media visitors to. A blog, or a website is the best place. You can add as much content as you want, in a way that you are comfortable with. You can say whatever you want, in any way that you want to express yourself. Your blog is your online personality.

When you are first starting out, it is best to keep things simple. Just use the templates that come with whatever blogging platform that you choose to go with. Down the road, when you want to rebuild your blog, it is very easy to update and change your blog sites appearance.

The beauty of a blog is that the content is separate from the template that creates the look of the blog. You can change the template and the appearance of your blog as often as you want and your content will automatically be added to the new site.

You can upload new content to your blog and send it to your social media followers through your different social media sites. Anyone following your posts and updates, or following the people that follow you, can click on the link and they will be able to read the full post.

Any one of these is a great place to start. My preference is for WordPress because with the right hosting, you own and control, your own domain. This means that you have your own email servers, you can easily set up Google and Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics in the background. You have far greater control over how your site is used and managed.

You can have a presence on all of these different blogging sites, just make sure that the content that you put on each of these sites is very different from what is on the other sites. You can use each of the different blogging platforms for different reasons if you want to.

Personally, I would just stick to one blog platform and focus on integrating it with my social media sites. It can get a little confusing trying to keep track of connecting just one blog with the different social media sites. Adding in another two, or three, blogs to this could get a little overwhelming.

Blogger

Blogger / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service) is owned by Google. It is their online blog site, that is easily connected to their online social media platform, Google+. Google makes it very easy to set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools in Blogger. The set up time is minimal, you can be up and running, posting your first messages to the online world in about 15 minutes. Blogger is a good platform because of the tie in to Google+. By updating Blogger, you can also post the update to Google+ and Google+ is still very relevant as a social media platform.

Tumblr

Tumblr / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr is now owned by Yahoo. Tumblr is what is known as a micro blog, or short form (post) style of blog. It incorporates a Twitter feed, so whenever you post something to your Tumblr page an update will be sent out to your Twitter feed. Tumblr puts more emphasis on media such as images or videos. A lot of the users like it because they prefer the style of short, frequent posts. If you do not have a lot of time to devote to a blog, but you want an “all in one” solution, this is a good site to use.

WordPress – the version that you host on your servers

There are actually two versions of WordPress. One version is hosted on the servers that you get when you sign up for domain hosting. This is a free version of the WordPress software you download through your cPanel. After you set a few things up you can start adding your content.

This version of WordPress allows you to control every aspect of your online presence. You have your own email through your own servers. You can change the look and feel of your site by simply uploading a new template, or by making changes to your existing template. Your cost for this
https://wordpress.org / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress

WordPress.org – the version that is hosted by WordPress

The second version version of WordPress is also free, but it hosted on the WordPress.org servers. This is easier to set up than the downloadable version of WordPress, but it is limited in what it can do. You cannot upload your own templates, you have to work with the templates that WordPress gives you. You can make changes to the templates, but these are pretty basic changes compared to what you can do with the downloadable version of WordPress that you host on your own domain.

The templates that WordPress.org does give you are very good and most people are happy with the look and the feel of them. The good news is that if you ever outgrow your WordPress.org site, you can back it up and move it to your own hosted version of WordPress and install it on your own servers. WordPress has made this a lot easier to do than it used to be.
http://wordpress.com / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress.com

SquareSpace

SquareSpace / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squarespace I do not know much about SquareSpace. A friend of mine who does a lot of web design and SEO work told me about this blog site. This is a commercial blogging platform that you have to pay per month to use. They charge $10, $20 and $30 per month for the Personal, Professional, or Business plan. He said that it is a very good platform with a lot of features built into it.

Social Media Sites

Once you have your website, or blog set up you will need to let people know about your business. While search engine traffic is important, social media traffic has become even more important. Search engines have been ranking websites by how much traffic, links and likes they get from social media sources. The more you are talked about on social media sites, the better your rankings.

This makes a huge amount of sense. Social media signals are very hard to fake. If people like your site, they share it. If they don’t like your sit, they will not share it. This gives the search engines simple and clean numbers and links to work with. In the old days, black hat SEO could easily fool the search engines. Today the social media signals are created by real people sharing your information. Real people equal real results and real traffic.

Start with whichever social media account you feel that you have the most interest in, or the one that you think will be the easiest to set up. When that one is finished, pick another, then another. You will have all of these accounts set up very quickly if you do it this way. By the time you get to the harder projects, you will be a master at setting these up and knowing what has to go where.

FaceBook

FaceBook / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook is the biggest social media site on the internet in terms of active users. Twitter is close and so is YouTube. Although YouTube is very important to your web presence, I am not sure I would call it a true social media site. When you set up your FaceBook page, you want to also send notifications of new blog posts from your blog site (or sites) to FaceBook. It is very important to get the content onto FaceBook and the links back to your blog site. As more people see your posts and FaceBook updates, they will like them and send them to other friends, which will send a lot of links and traffic back to your blog site. These links will help to increase your search engine rankings and bring in additional traffic.

Google+

It is very important to set up a Google+ account / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B By sharing your blog posts through Google+ you could get your content indexed more quickly. Like FaceBook, Google+ has a feature that allows users to “like” (or “Plus”) and “share” your content. This gives you some indication of how well received your posts are. If your content is also on Google+, you can also set up alerts to track what people are saying about you and your business. By looking at the feedback, you might get an idea of what your readers are looking for and you might be able to head off any problems before they become serious.

Twitter

Twitter / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter is one of the first social media sites that you want to set up. Once you have Twitter set up, you want to link your social media sites to your Twitter account so that whenever you publish a new blog post, add a Facebook update, add content to Blogger or Google+, it will also be sent out to your Twitter feed.

You will want to add your Twitter feed to the home page of your blog site. This is fairly easy to do in WordPress with either a plugin, or by manually adding the code for the feed. You want to add Twitter contacts that have similar interests to what you are posting on your blog. Their Twitter posts could be added to the Home page of your blog so that the search engines see that you are always adding new content to your site.

LinkedIn / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkedin This is more of a business networking website. If you have any special skills, or knowledge, then this would be a good idea to join. Once your SEO skills and social media traffic building skills are proving to bring in traffic, LinkedIn would be a good idea to join under the SEO category, and possibly the web design category. You could post SEO articles on your website and maybe get some feedback from your LinkedIn contacts.

Pinterest / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest Pinterest is sort of an online bulletin board of pictures, thoughts and ideas. You can put together a “pinboard” collection of ideas that you may want to pursue, a inboard of goals, or a inboard of pictures that showcases your business.

You can link Pinterest to your FaceBook and Twitter accounts, so anything that you put up on Pinterest will show up on your FaceBook page and Twitter feed. If you have Twitter and FaceBook set up to display your updates and tweets on your blogs’ home page, then those pictures will show up on your home page. This will show up in the search engines as new content for your website, which the search engines want to see on a regular basis.

YouTube

YouTube / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube YouTube is a video sharing website, so it might not fit into the normal definition of social media. Most of the uploaded content is not user generated, it is existing content that gets re-shared (re-gifted?). Even so, it is actually very important to set up a YouTube account.

I would probably leave this one until last, just because of the amount of work involved in adding your own content. You can add other people’s content to your account and then link to that from your YouTube Account to a post on your blog. The linked video could be used to add support to the post that you have written. This will help give you a bit of a boost with your search engine rankings because of YouTubes huge domain authority.

It would be even better to add your own videos to your YouTube account. These could be as simple as doing a voice over while you show slides for the video. If you are not camera shy, then you could be seen doing a hands on demonstration, or interviewing someone.

By putting your own videos online, they could be picked up by others and added to their accounts, or they could be used on their websites. If they get used on other people’s websites, then the code links them to your YouTube account and back to your own website. This will boost your domain’s authority and give your search rankings another boost.

Using HootSuite to Manage Everything

HootSuite / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hootsuite is a very interesting company, based up here in very beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. HootSuite is a subscription based tool, but it is worth the investment. What HootSuite does is manages all of your social media and even your blog posts. You upload your content, tell HootSuite what to publish and where to publish it and then tell it when you want it published. It will allow you to set up a schedule to post your content when you need it posted. If you need weekly blog posts, that also need to be uploaded to your FaceBook page and then tweeted to your followers, HootSuite will do it.

This is more of a power users tool. If you run multiple websites with connected social media and an active Twitter feed, then this will cut down your workload considerably. Everything you need to manage the content flow for all of your sites will be in one place.

Writing Content for Search Engine Optimization

When you are writing content for your website, the first rule is that the article must be over 500 words, 1000 to 1500 words are usually the best numbers to aim for. Anything over 500 words gets you over the Thin Content level. Less than 500 words can mean the page may get flagged as having thin, or low content.

One thing that I have noticed is that a page with more than 2000 words seems to have a higher bounce rate than pages with around 1500 words. I am assuming that people just do not want to read that much and just leave, not only the page, but the whole site.

Noindexing Pages

Make sure you Noindex pages that have less than 500 words, or combine pages with low content with other similar pages. If you cannot combine those pages with other pages, then consider rewriting those pages if you still want to keep them in the search engines.

Any pages with forms, basic contact information, general information that is not content related to your website content should also be noindexed.

Page Bounce Rate and Website Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the number of people that go to a page from the search engine and then leave that page, without going anywhere else within your site. If your visitor arrives at your page and then leaves within a few seconds, that is very bad, you really need to do some work on that page to make your visitors stay longer on that page, and to want to go into your site from that page.

A page that has a high Bounce Rate, but the visitor stays on that page for a long time, is actually not bad. Google looks at the bounce rate as well as time spent on page to come up with a percentage for each page of your website, as well as an overall site bounce rate.

Bounce Rate is thought to be a very important part of the Google Algorithm. The higher the bounce rate, with a low time spent on page means your site will get pushed down in the search results. I usually check the bounce rate once a month and try to rewrite the pages that have a high bounce rate and low time spent on page. If you do not have time to rewrite content, then I would strongly suggest that you noindex the high bounce rate pages. Since nobody is really spending any time on them, they are just hurting your site.

Google and Bing Webmaster Rules for Writing Content

Here are two links to the Google and Bing content rules for web masters. These will give you a good idea about what both search engines are looking for when they spider your content. Yahoo uses the Bing search engine, so what works for Bing also works for Yahoo.

Google Webmaster Rules for Creating Website Content
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en&topic=8522

Bing Webmaster Rules for Creating Website Content
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a

Anchor text for hyperlinks

Be careful how you use your anchor text for your hyperlinks, Google changes back and forth on this every few algorithm updates, so will have to keep an eye on your Google Analytics for changes in page rankings. I have found that “Click Here”, or something similar seems to be safe as long as your primary or secondary keywords are in the same sentence as the hyper link.

When you are linking to outside sites, it is important to make sure that those sites are not only relevant, but also reputable sites. Just because the content on the site you are linking to looks like it is a good fit to your site does not mean that there is a lot of garbage within that site. You have to do some exploring when you are linking to new, or unknown sites.

Headings Tags – H1, H2 tags

A big part of keeping your visitors engaged and on your site for a longer period of time is how your pages look. This is where the Heading Tags come in. These are the H1, H2 and occasionally the H3 tags are used. They break up your content, they draw the readers eye to the next main point and keep them scrolling down the page and staying on your website.

When you use the Heading Tags, the H1 tag is ONLY used once on the page, for the page heading at the very top. Your primary keyword phrase must be in the H1 tag so the search engines know what this page is going to be about. The page content must have the keyword phrase in the page content as well. Just make sure that you do not use the primary keyword phrase too much, or Google might think you are keyword spamming.

The H2 tag is used throughout the page to break up the content and to introduce the reader to another major point, or thought. The H2 tag should contain the secondary keywords that you will be using on your webpage. If the Heading Tag is only going to be used to introduce a new topic to thought, but you will not be using a keyword phrase in it, then use the H3 tag.

Meta Tags – Title and Description

While this is not seen by your site visitors, it is very important to have your primary keyword phrase in your page title and page description. The search engines read both of these tags and then they compare the content to the H1 and H2 tags, and the page content on your webpage to get an idea of what the page is really about. If your primary keyword phrase is not in either of these two tags, then the search engines will look at your content and try to figure out what the page is about. This can lead to some confused website visitors and a very high bounce rate.

Above the Fold

One of the most important parts of your webpage is the first paragraph. Your first paragraph must contain your primary keyword, but the first paragraph must also hook, or engage your reader. It helps to set the tone for rest of the webpage. Your goal is to create a quality website page that will engage your readers and hold their attention so that they will spend more time on your page and go into your website for more useful information.

Next, you want to make sure that there is information “above the fold” or the part of the webpage that is visible in the browser when you first go to the page. There should not be any ads in this part of the webpage, make sure they are lower down and only visible when the reader scrolls down.

Google wants information, not ads visible when you first land on a webpage. This is very important, several years ago Google integrated an “above the fold” penalty for websites that did not have relevant information, or content above the fold. People were making great pages for the search engines, but not for the site visitors and Google came down hard on these sites.

You need Quality, Engaging Content

You need to write informative content that will keep your readers attention. This is where you help your reader to solve their problem. Everything that you write should be about identifying and solving problems, not preaching to people. Your visitor already knows what their situation is, they came to your site to find help, a solution to their problem. Your website should be the resource that gives them their solution.

To do that, you need to give them relevant information in a way that keeps their attention and is easy to read.

Always use short paragraphs
Keep your sentences short
Use the Heading Tags to introduce new thoughts, or to make a point
Use bullets, or numbers to make points

Never talk about yourself, keep your story and experiences for your biography, or “About Me” page and link to that in the article, or webpage with an appropriate sentence. You may have experienced what they are going through, and it may be very relevant, but you can give a very descriptive story about your situation and experiences on your About Me page better than you could cover in a few paragraphs in a webpage.

Building a Social Media Following

One of the primary reasons for writing engaging, problem solving content is to build a strong social media following. If you have done a great job of solving problems and providing relevant information, you will gain Facebook and other social media followers. The more social media followers you get, the stronger your sites Domain Authority becomes and your site will climb in the search results.

Your goal is not just to create a site that is ranked very well in the search engines, but to have a strong social media following. There are some sites that do not even bother with search engines because they have such a huge social media presence. Every time they add content, it is sent out to their social media followers where it is shared with other social media followers that only know you through someone that they trust. The recommendation of a trusted friend is far stronger than any search engine result.

Writing Your Content

Always take your time when you are doing your research, writing and editing. Make sure that you keep track of the website URLs of the sites that gave you the best information. You will want to link to these sites within your article. Make sure the topic that you are writing about is relevant to your overall website, do not go off topic. Become a specialist in your area of knowledge, the expert that everyone wants to go to.

Your readers will reward your hard work and dedication by staying on the page and maybe exploring your website. This will give you a lower bounce rate and a stronger social media following when the readers “Like” the page and share it with their friends. If you have a newsletter, you will gain readers that are eager for your next article.

Making sure the article is going to be set up properly for the search engines and making sure that it flows well and reads well for your visitors is going to take a little while to get used to. This is little bit of an art form, but after a few articles, it becomes very easy to incorporate the SEO into the writing of the article. This is where the heading Tags, the introductory paragraph, the anchor text in your hyperlinks and your keyword phrases, all come together.

You want to focus on generating, regular, quality content for your website. It is very important to establish a schedule to do this. You may want to create content weekly, or every two weeks. If you are not knowledgeable about your chosen topic yet, then every two weeks probably a good starting point. The hardest part is going to be the research. Writing the article is going to be fairly straightforward.

I am going to end this article with a link to a site that tracks all of the major Google Algorithm changes. Google makes around 500 algorithm changes per year, sometimes they change several times a day. If you are a webmaster, it is important to keep on top of these changes and to check your Google Analytics account and Google and Bing webmaster accounts for any changes to your websites traffic when the updates roll out.

Domain Authority and Link Building

Domain Authority is an estimate of how strongly rated your domain is estimated to be. It is based on the strength of the other domains that are linking to your website. If no domains are linking to your website, your domain authority will be very low. If several websites with very high domain authority have linked to your website, then your domain authority will be strong. The higher your domain authority, the better your Google and Bing rankings.

This is why YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook, University and other high traffic resource websites dominate the Google search results. They all have domain authority in the 90s. If you can get links from those sites, and back link to those sites, that domain authority gets passed to your website and it will climb in the rankings.

It is very important to link back to an internal page of a high domain authority site that is linking to your domain, not their home page. Make sure that the page that you are linking to matches the content of the page that you are linking from. You also want to try to avoid linking directly back to the page that the site is linking to you from. It is not a huge problem if you do this occasionally.

If numerous pages on your website link back to the same pages within the various domains that link to your website, that will get Googles’ attention as an unnatural linking profile and earn you a penalty, sometimes a very severe penalty if you have done this too much. If you keep linking to the home pages of the various domains, it will also look like an unnatural linking profile and you will wind up with a penalty instead of bonus traffic.

I know that I have said this already, but this is critical; to avoid getting a penalty, link back to different internal pages on the other domains, that have similar content to the page you are linking from. This will show Google and Bing that you have put a lot of thought into your content and that you are trying to deliver a great experience for your readers.

If you are not aware of this yet, whenever you link to an outside website – always make sure that the link opens in a new browser window. That way when the reader closes the new window, your site is still open in the background. You may have people continue reading your website and it will also show that people have spent a lot of time on your website even though they were reading something in a new window.

There are exceptions to how you link to pages on some domains:

Passing on YouTube domain authority;

If you have your own YouTube page and you are placing your YouTube videos on your website from this page, you should be OK. I would suggest that you also link to other YouTube videos from other, relevant YouTube pages just to increase the diversity of links. If you write a new page on a topic, find a YouTube video that relates to that topic and use the YouTube embed link to embed that video on your website as part of your article.

Passing on FaceBook domain authority;

If you have a Facebook page, you will be posting your content updates on your Facebook page and linking back to your website. Everyone does this and it does give you a slight boost. What you also want to do is find the Facebook pages that are similar your website and if they have good, relevant content, write a new article on your domain and use link it to their Facebook page, or the post that they wrote.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
This is a free tool, but it is limited in how much information you can see. It only lists the Domain Authority for the top 5 websites that are linking to your website. It is still useful though. You can scroll down the list and look at all the sites that have linked to your site and you may spot some sites that you recognize. These are the sites that you will want to link back to.

Look for .org websites and then put the domain into the Site Explorer and check their domain authority. If it is legitimate .org website, it will have a domain authority greater than 50. The higher the better. .gov websites are great, so are recognized domain names, but check them in the site explorer first to make sure they are real sites and not someone who set up a copycat domain using a name variation. .org websites can be bought by anyone, so make sure you check them. You can just as easily drop your domain authority by lining to bad websites. Google has a neat penalty waiting for you for this whenever they run the Penguin algorithm.

The best way to back link to a high domain authority website that has linked to your website is to add a link back to their website through new content. You could find a page on their domain that is relevant to the content on your domain and write 1000 to 1500 about the relevancy and then link to that internal page in their domain within your new content.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
This explains how Domain Authority is calculated. Because Domain Authority is hard to fake, it is becoming a very valuable indicator of how well your site is viewed by other sites. If a lot of sites that rank high for Domain Authority are linking to your website, it probably means that your site is being viewed as a high quality site by other high quality sites.

Two sites that you want to try to get into. These both have very high domain authority and all the sites are reviewed by people, so Google and Bing put a lot of credibility on the domains that are listed in these directories.

http://www.dmoz.org
DMOZ is also known as Open Directory. It is made up of websites that are reviewed by people, so everything in this directory is real and legitimate. It can take sometime before your site shows up in the directory, because the people reviewing the sites are all volunteers and they each may have numerous categories to oversee.

http://dir.yahoo.com
Yahoo Directory is similar to DMOZ in that a person reviews your domain and if they feel that it has good content and it is relevant to that category, they will include it in their directory. The Yahoo directory results not the same as Yahoo search results. Yahoo search results will not show up in the Yahoo Directory, but Yahoo Directory results will show up in Yahoo Search results. US users have to pay annually for inclusion in the Yahoo index. Canadian and foreign users did not have to pay for inclusion, but this may have also changed.

Google Places a lot of weight on being in the Yahoo Directory. It used to place a lot of weight on being in the Open Directory, but over the years Open Directory has become less relevant, but still very important. It is still a very good idea to try and get your site into Open Directory and Google will still place a lot of weight on this, because your site was reviewed by a human editor, so they know that it is a real, and legitimate, website. This will give your domain ranking a boost, even if you cannot get into the Yahoo Directory.

Overcoming the Fear of Getting Started

One of the hardest things you might ever have to confront is the fear of getting started. You start out with the best of intentions and then sometimes you let your imagination get the best of you. You start to doubt yourself and what you are doing.

The questions and the voices start;

Will this work?
Why am I bothering with this?
What if this does not work and I am just wasting my time?
How will I survive if this does not work?
Everyone has told me that this is a stupid idea!

I have dealt with all of these questions at one time or another and sometimes the fear is almost paralyzing. Especially that last question because it can take on so many different forms and create so much more doubt which leads to even more fear. Suddenly we are all alone and alone can be a terrifying place.

We really can be our own worst enemies

Being self employed I have nothing to fall back on. Everything is on me, there is no income from a job waiting for me so the pressure can really build up and these fears become so real that sometimes I have to fight to get started.

What drives me forward is that I really like what I do for a living and the thought of a real job scares me more than what my imagination is doing to me some days. I know that the reality is never as bad as what I am telling myself.

My fear of getting started on something new usually happens because one of these things;

I have taken on too much at one time
I am disorganized again
I am overwhelmed with everything happening around me
Everything is coming at me all at once and I cannot think things through

I cannot think, or act, because I am not in control anymore, outside factors are affecting me and my decision making abilities.

My imagination is driving my life again

One solution I found is actually pretty simple, I stop. I get organized again. I slow down for a few days and I plan things out so I am ahead of the work, not reacting to it. Sometimes I take some time and I exercise. By doing this, things do not look as bleak and I am able to start the new job, or get back to work on existing projects, or write new content for websites.

Sometimes letting go for a few days is the best solution and other times moving ahead is even better

Which brings me to another solution – push forward through the fear. This is really hard to do, but I have found that if I just get started I feel a whole lot better. The only reason I can come up with for feeling better is that by moving forward I am able to see some hope ahead of me. Doing something productive means that I am not giving in to the fear and that creates a lot of positive feelings.

If you have ever had to deal with the fear of starting something new, or sometimes even doing a simple job, you may have run into the problem of overthinking the new task or project. Instead of starting, you sit down and think about all the details ahead of you, planning out the little tasks, and thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong.

This is paralysis by planning and if you are already overwhelmed, this can create a whole new level of fear about getting started, or even just continuing on. You tell yourself, why bother, it will not work. You find yourself not wanting to do the things that a few days ago were not a problem to do. Opening up a computer program brings on a cold sweat because of what you might see there. Yes, I have been there. More than once.

What gets me through is I start something, or I force myself to keep working on a project. I do my best to ignore the fears and the voices inside me. I just get started and I always find that my imagination was wrong. I really do feel better by getting started or pushing further ahead. Suddenly, I am moving forward, there is hope and I find myself too busy to listen to my imagination. I know this sounds simple and a little strange, but it really does work.

When you are confronted by the fear of starting something new, it is actually your bodies defence mechanism kicking in. Sort of an emotional fight or flight reflex. By fighting, you are moving forward, towards the danger of the unknown. You are giving up all of the safety and security of everything you know and understand to head out into what your brain and imagination is telling you is dangerous territory. By giving in, you are running, retreating to the safety of your old life.

Fear is your body is trying to protect you from yourself and your ambitions

Most of us are not born risk takers. We are programmed to stay with the pack, to live within what the majority says is just common sense. The fear you are experiencing is you fighting this evolutionary programming. The fear is actually a good thing, you just have to accept it and believe that this is a good sign. You are leaving the ordinary behind, your comfort zone, and doing what very few people ahead of you have the courage to attempt.

Sure, there will be some setbacks along the way, but that is life. A job with a steady paycheque has risks. Driving to and from that steady job everyday has risks.

Nobody can control risk, but You can control the fear that holds you back from starting something new.

If you want to live a great life, you are going to have to accept that fear is going to be a part of it. You also have to accept that you really can control that fear. How you do it might be different from how I control it. For you, it might be;

Pictures of your favourite city
Thinking about your family
Something that you truly want in life
Maybe you work better if you go to the gym before you get to work or when you feel the fear coming on
Maybe you need to get out to a nice coffee shop and be around people that have the life you want and this inspires you
Taking up a new sport or martial art to force yourself to think of something else, like not getting hit
Zen Gardens or Bonsai to force yourself to meditate and clear your head

For me it has always been a combination of several of the things on this list. Some people only do one, some people never stop looking and trying because they have discovered that distraction creates ideas.

What may look crazy to someone close to you, is not crazy to you if it works

We are all different and we all react differently to our surroundings, our own goals and desires and how we overcome our fears. You need to find what works for you so that you have a place to go when that fear grabs hold of you. Someone I used to work with referred to it as his “Happy Place”. I never understood that until I stepped out of my comfort zone and I experienced how bad this type of fear can really be when you have no safety net. Those voices really are convincing.

No matter what is driving you, you are going to have to accept that you are going to be leaving your old life behind and your emotional fight or flight reflex will be working overtime for a while. I can honestly say that it does get easier.

The fear may still come up out of nowhere some days, but by confronting that fear and pushing through it, you will move ahead and before you know it, you will look back and be amazed at how far you have come. I look at where I have come from, and what I had to force my way through, and I am still shocked at how I got here. While I am still afraid some days, I look at the fear as a sign that I am leaving another comfort zone behind and I am going to be moving forward again very soon.